How To Come Back From Vacation
We took a mini summer vacation, did you miss us? (Just lie and say you did). Coming back from vacation can be tough. It’s easy to stay in vacation mode and get overwhelmed by everything when you come back. Fortunately there are a few things you can do to get back to business after vacation.
Take Care of Things Before You Leave
This is much easier said than done.* Why bother going on a vacation if you’re going to be super stressed beforehand? But you don’t want to come back to a huge mess either. Prior planning makes coming back from vacation a gazillion times easier.
At work make sure all your bases are covered. Make a list of on going projects and make sure you have a coworker to cover them for you.** Also clean your desk/work area – you don’t want to come back to a mess, it’ll just stress you out.
At home try to make your house/apartment/room as clean as possible (or as it’s going to get) so you don’t come home to a disaster zone. If you have pets and aren’t taking them with you make sure you have arrangements for their care. Same goes for plants or anything else that needs to be taken care of. Make sure everything’s turned of before you leave, you don’t want to stress out thinking about how high your electricity bill is going to be or if you left the oven on.
Ease Back Into a Routine
Mentally shifting from vacation mode to life mode is easy if you took care of things before your vacation. But if you didn’t take care of things or were rushed it can be a bit jolting to have to go back to reality after vacation. There’s no point in going on vacation if you’re going to be more stressed out when you get back then when you left. Don’t try to do everything at once, ease back into a ‘normal’ mentality instead of forcing yourself back into it. Take a few hours at work (if you can) to catch up with what you missed when you were out of the office then begin to tackle projects. At home don’t try to do all the cleaning at once, instead do it piecemeal, etc.
*Like arranging guest bloggers or writing posts ahead of time. Oops.
**Make sure to bring something back/get a small gift for your awesome coworker who was nice enough to cover for you.
